One of my earliest memories is of watching Richard Nixon on
television—all flop sweat and clichéd delivery—sitting at his desk in the Oval
Office surrounded by boxes of reel-to-reel tape, declaring that he wasn’t a
crook. I believed him. I couldn’t understand how someone (The PRESIDENT!) could
sit there on live TV and lie.
My parents had no such qualms. “He’s a god damn liar.”
“Tricky Dick.” It was like they were telling me not to believe in George
Washington.
As I came to understand more about Nixon—especially his successes, his class-conscious paranoia, as well as his genuine devotion to public service—I
realized that more than anything, his real flaws involved his egotism and his
belief in a relative relationship between the truth and the law expressed in
his famous line that “if the President does it, it’s not against the law.”
Let’s just call it moral hypocrisy.
And for me, the most heinous moral hypocrisy has always
involved religion. Twisting faith and scripture for fun and profit. The
deliberate manipulation of many people’s most vulnerable emotions, by one who
actually understands and shares those emotions. Someone who actually believes.
I wanted to take a look at someone like that. Nixon with a
Bible. An Evangelist.
